Harmonizing Genesis with a very old universe

I'm going to throw an odd proposal out there. Please note that I'm not saying I believe this. Neither am I saying I don't. I'm throwing it out there as an idea for people to chew on, because I find this manufactured fight between science and the Bible to be tiresome, unnecessary, and destructive, and I want to find a way past it. Consider it an amusing idea. If it bothers you, for either religious or areligious reasons, feel free to forget you ever saw it. (Because, hey, you are.) This is intended to help, not to cause difficulty.

The Book of Genesis describes the creation of the world. It describes the first man and woman and their descendents. Genesis presents an unbroken genealogy from the creation until the time of Joseph, complete with the ages of each individual. From that point, further books of the Bible give a sequence of later events, some of which can be correlated to outside historical references. Taking all those things together, we can build a timeline that shows about six thousand years have passed since the creation of the world, give or take a minute.

So why does the world look so much older than that?

Now, let's not start with any prejudice. Momentarily forget you have beliefs on this matter, and break the problem down as if you were seeing it for the first time. As I see it, there are three main possibilities, each with two sub-possibilities. In no particular order:

1) Deceptively old Earth. The world just looks old, and really isn't. God made the world six thousand years ago, in such a way that it looks old.
1a) God was unable to make the world any way he wanted. Limited God.
1b) God made the world exactly as he wanted; God wanted us to think the world older than it is. Deceptive God.

2) Young Earth creation science. The world doesn't look old at all, we're just modeling it wrong.
2a) Our observations are in error, so our model of them is incorrect. Bad data.
2b) Our observations are correct, but our model is incorrect. Bad interpretation.

3) Standard scientific model. The world really is much, much older than 6,000 years.
3a) We're misunderstanding the Bible, and it is not telling us that the world is 6,000 years old. Flawed reading.
3b) We understand the Bible correctly, it is telling us that the world is 6,000 years old, and the Bible is simply wrong. Flawed text.

Possibility 1 is, definitionally, outside the realm of science. Science deals with patterns in nature, identifying them and extrapolating from them. Miracles break those patterns, so science can't speak about them one way or another. If God made the world look old, presumably he did a good job and we wouldn't find any evidence. It's no different than the idea that you were created five minutes ago with a few decades worth of memories; it's possible, but it's also untestable, so you may as well not worry about it and move on.

Possibility 2 is a fine place to start. Science is all about checking your work and challenging theory. Anybody who tells you otherwise is doing it wrong! But that same principle requires us to admit when the weight of data is against the challenge. Given all the evidence, any model that allows for the universe as we observe it to be only six thousand years old becomes unnecessarily (and more important, untestably) complex.

For example: if the universe is that young, why can we see stars more than six thousand light years away? That light shouldn't have gotten here yet. What does that imply? Either the speed of light is variable under circumstances we haven't observed, or the universe is a millionth the size we think it is. The former, since it's unobservable, is not science. For the latter to be true, all our models of how stars work has to also be thrown out, and we don't have a good replacement model for that either. Either way, we're making a model more complex than it needs to be to explain observations, just to make it fit an unobserved data point.

(Note that I'm not saying you can't believe this, or anything else. I'm just saying it's not science at that point.)

So if we want to stay in the realm of science, we're left with possibility 3. And if we want to maintain a belief in Biblical inerrancy (which is my preference), we're left with 3a. So now we're not talking about science; we're talking about altering our understanding of a text in order to keep it consistent with observed fact. This has been called "spin" before, in a derogatory fashion, or an exercise in rationalization. Call it what you will (as long as you don't call it science). We're talking about complicating our model of a text to maintain its consistency with our scientific model of the universe, and there is nothing wrong about that endeavor.

Because a model of the text is what we have, right? What the text actually says, and what we understand it to mean, are two different things. The Bible never says "The earth was created 3528 years before the deportation to Babylon" or anything like that. That's just a conclusion we can reach if we start with the text and make certain assumptions. What I'm asking is, what are those assumptions? And are there any we can do without?

The primary assumption is that there's no gap in the timeline between creation and some other correlated event. Our first actual datable event is the age of Adam when Seth was born (130 years). But is Adam's age actually dated from the creation of Earth? Or is it perhaps dated from the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, when death entered the world, at which point age has meaning? If the latter, we have some discontinuity. That gap is where I'll insert my imagined harmonization.

Consider how Genesis describes creation after the Fall: pain, a battle to survive, and eventually, death. The world is cursed, and everything in the world will eventually die. In other words, the world as we know it.

Before the Fall? None of that. No death. No pain in childbirth. A world utterly unlike this one in every way.

So what if it wasn't this world?

Here's the idea: God creates, exactly as described in Genesis. He creates Eden, a perfect place without death or disease. Maybe it's not unlike Earth; maybe it's a place with different physical laws; maybe it's all completely aphysical and indescribable in any terms we have. All that is beside the point. God creates Man, somewhere not here, and Man exists in Eden in harmony with God for some interval.

Eventually, Man sins, and can no longer live in that world. Man dies; life as he has known it is over. But rather than eternally and completely terminate Man, God gives Man another place to live. God creates an entirely new universe, this new one based on death and decay ("the ground is cursed for your sake"), and inserts Man into it. God, being outside time, sees the entirety of this new creation, from beginning to end, and finds what He judges to be the best place and time to insert Man: a planet covered with water orbiting a yellow star, filled with all sorts of life, about fifteen billion years after the start of the new creation. Why there? Because on this life-filled planet has evolved a group of particularly smart tool-using hominids. Man, as he was created, is no more. But what he was, his soul, is now inspired into these creatures, to live and die here in this decaying universe.

This is obviously unorthodox, but is there anything about it that's problematic? It can't have scientific issues, because it's not talking about patterns in nature at any point. We're talking about something totally unobservable. And all of this is clearly within the power of God. The only change to the typical scriptural interpretation is the idea that Eden didn't exist somewhere on Earth, but was some other domain of existence. Which, frankly, makes a lot of things more sensible anyway. (Also, as a bonus, all that implied incest in early generations is done away with.)

Now, this proposition has interesting consequences. First, it implies there's something interesting about humans biologically that makes us unique for God's purposes. Presumably our intelligence, since we're not good at much else compared to other animals. This implies that the ability to think is, for whatever reason, a trait God finds desirable for us to have. God gave us big brains, and intends for us to use them! (Maybe just because there are billions of us, and without intelligence there's no way to feed that many? But that's way into speculative territory.)

Second, it implies an answer to the Fermi Paradox. Why do we see no other intelligent communicating races out there in the big vasty nothing? Because the universe was created for us. Maybe we're the first, or the only there will ever be. Or maybe not. But it's a possible answer.

Third, Man died. God told man that on the day he touched the tree, he would die, which is a common point of criticism leveled at Genesis; clearly Adam survived after that day. Under this model, that death is very literal. Man died, his life ended, and this is his afterlife. (In fact, the world bears a striking resemblance to some ideas of purgatory.) Which itself raises an interesting question: if Adam and Eve had a pre-life with God which ended because of their sin, were they the only ones? Or did the same thing happen with every single one of us? Is the story of Eden not a story of us collectively, but of every individual human to ever live? Is it a story that has played out billions of times? Did I, personally, live in the presence of God, and sin? Was I thus expelled from the presence of God into this thinking piece of animate meat?

I have no evidence, but at first glance I find that idea comforting. Because that would mean I'm not being punished for the sin of my remote ancestor. I'm being punished for my own sin. The concept of original sin becomes quite specific. If I hadn't sinned, I wouldn't be alive on Earth. But again, way into speculative territory.

This is all just one idea. Like I said, I'm not sure I believe it. But I'm reasonably sure it works as an idea. And if I can come up with one way to keep the Bible literally true and inerrant, while maintaining a scientific worldview, there have to be others. If I can come up with one way, God can come up with many, many more. I'm only interested in demonstrating that it's possible.

So can we get past the science vs. Bible arguments? Please?